Amazon—and 56 Other Corporations—Took Your Tax Dollars

"The U.S. Treasury reported that corporations paid $92 billion less in federal taxes in 2018 than they did in 2017, a 31 percent drop off." (Photo: Zhu/flickr/cc)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Bernie Sanders, castigator of the one percent, is a millionaire now. So are Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren. Big whoop. There’s a crucial difference between these candidates seeking the Democratic presidential nomination and the super wealthy – particularly 60 gigantic, massively profitable U.S. corporations. The candidates faithfully pay federal taxes. The corporations don’t.

That’s right. Sixty profitable corporations paid no federal taxes in 2018, twice the number that typically paid nothing in the years before the 2017 tax breaks took effect. In fact, it’s worse than that. Fifty-seven of these corporations demanded rebates from the government – which means taxpayers like you and me paid them to exist. These are corporations on the dole. They claim to hate socialism if it means Medicare for All, but they sure as hell love socialism when it’s welfare for them.

Sanders, Harris, Warren and other candidates seeking the Democratic nomination paid their taxes because they are patriots. Most working Americans pay a fair share to support their country. True citizens pay so that their nation can thrive. They pay so that the United States can afford to educate its citizens, pave its roads, operate its courts, care for its vulnerable and sustain its military. They pay because they understand they have a duty to the country that nurtured them, that protects them and that they love.

But too many U.S. corporations, which the U.S. Supreme Court has anointed with human rights, refuse to acknowledge their concomitant obligations. Corporations and the super wealthy pushed hard for the tax breaks Republicans bestowed on them in 2017. Fat cats paid untold tens of millions to dark money groups that served as cash cows for GOP candidates who, once elected, shepherded those tax breaks.

Corporate front groups and GOP apologists such as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin insisted the tax cuts would pay for themselves. Mnuchin went even further, contending the cuts would reduce the deficit by $1 trillion. Everything would be hunky-dory.

Republicans take those deficit figures – deficits they created by cutting taxes – and use them to demand offsetting spending cuts – that is cuts to Social Security, cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, cuts to food stamps and school lunch programs, cuts to programs that are precious to workers and the poor.

The deficits grow like this: Amazon, the online marketplace, made nearly $11 billion last year and instead of paying the current, low 21 percent corporate tax rate on that income, it demanded that taxpayers give it $129 million. Which they did. It wasn’t a rebate since Amazon paid no taxes. It was a big fat, gift withdrawn involuntarily from workers’ pockets, wrapped in a fuzzy, flocked Amazon smiley bag, and deposited directly into corporate coffers. This is perverse wealth transfer, from the poor and middle class to the rich and corporations.

And taxpayers didn’t even get Amazon Prime in exchange.

Of the 60 profitable corporations that paid no taxes, 57 got payments like this from workers. Amazon’s wasn’t even the largest. Ten companies took more, including Duke Energy, which set an infamous record for itself by grubbing the most – $647 million. On about $76 billion in pretax income, the 57 forced taxpayers to give them $4.3 billion.

And it’s not like Amazon and its fellow corporate welfare recipients don’t deliver their goods on the roads that workers’ tax dollars construct, or snap up software engineers educated in public schools that workers’ tax dollars build, or argue their patent cases in courts that workers’ tax dollars maintain.

President Donald Trump and majorities in Congress are all for infrastructure improvements too. But it never happens. And the reason is money. There is no money to do it when so many U.S. corporations use this infrastructure to make boatloads of money, pay no taxes and demand the government give them workers’ tax dollars.

Other Democrats seeking the party’s nomination for president released tax returns showing they paid their fair share as well. They include Kamala Harris who reported earnings of about $1.9 million and paid at an effective tax rate of 37 percent last year. Sen. Warren, with an adjusted gross income of $846,394, paid at a rate of 27 percent. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, who had the lowest adjusted gross income of the Democrats who have released tax forms, $202,912, also, logically, paid the lowest rate, 15 percent.

Each of them paid more money and at a higher rate than billionaire Amazon.

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Leo Gerard, is the International President of the United Steelworkers (USW) union and is the second Canadian to head the union. He is also a vice president of the AFL-CIO. Gerard is co-chairman of the BlueGreen Alliance and on the boards of Campaign for America’s Future and the Economic Policy Institute.

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A belated, heartfelt happy birthday to Harvey Milk, assassinated in 1978 for daring to come out of the closet, be himself and insist on his rights, who would have turned 89 this week. On Harvey Milk Day, California passed a resolution honoring his "critical role in creating the modern LGBT movement." From one ally: "He imagined a righteous world inside his head and then he set about to create it." These dark days, his message resonates more than ever: "You stand up and fight."

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